Is Twitter Getting Sued Over Its Short Notice Mass Layoffs? It Certainly Looks Like It
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Just days after Elon Musk took over the Twittersphere, it looks like he won’t have time to bask in the beauty of his latest acquisition due to the company being at the center of a brand new lawsuit.
According to NBC News, on Thursday, a handful of former Twitter employees filed a class action suit against the social media platform alleging that it failed to comply to state a federal law that requires at least a 60-day notice before enacting a mass layoff. Five employees are suing, with three alleging that they were locked out of their Twitter accounts with no warning. Another claims they were laid off on Tuesday.
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In an internal email obtained by NBC on Thursday, Twitter announced it’d be beginning layoffs in “an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path” as early as Friday morning. And sure enough, as of Friday morning, several former Twitter employees have already gotten online to announce that they’d been let go. Because of that, the suit claims the company is in violation of the WARN Act, which stands for the “Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act that requires a 60-day notice for certain plant closings or mass layoffs.” The suit also seeks to “prevent Twitter from trying to obtain releases from workers without informing them of their rights and the lawsuit, according to the document.”
no vaseline #TwitterLayoffs pic.twitter.com/qMOhTtVXQo
— LookAtDustin (@LookAtDustin) November 4, 2022
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” the attorney representing the plaintiffs told Bloomberg in a statement.
Additionally, while the company gears up for this legal battle, per Reuters, other members of the internal team at Twitter Inc. are facing an uphill battle after being told my its new owner Musk that it must find “$1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings.”
Reuters has more:
The company is aiming to find between $1.5 million and $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services, said the Slack message, which referred to the project as “Deep Cuts Plan.”
Twitter is currently losing about $3 million a day “with all spending and revenue considered,” according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The steep infrastructure cuts could put the Twitter website and app at risk of going down during critical events when users are rushing to Twitter to consume and share information, such as during moments of crisis or major political events, the sources said.
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